Remember when Ukraine was the most corrupt country in Europe? This begs the question of why so many billions of Western taxpayer dollars were poured into its corrupt hands, because corrupt it still very much is.
The legacy media, which has been only too eager to parrot an endless litany of pro-Ukraine propaganda, is continuing the pall of silence over Ukraine’s ongoing corruption, especially a corruption scandal that spreads all the way through the Zelensky government and the president’s inner circle. The natural question is just how far up does it go?
A solid gold toilet and cupboards loaded with bagfuls of €200 bills are among the treasures linked to the prominent Ukrainian businessman Timur Mindich, after an investigation by Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (Nabu). Mindich is big in real estate, fertilisers, banking and diamond trading – but he is best known as a long-time co-owner of Volodymyr Zelensky’s Kvartal 95 television production company. Nabu’s 15-month long investigation into what it describes as ‘high level’ corruption at the top of Ukraine’s political elite is likely to have momentous consequences for Zelensky’s political future.
While Zelensky is publicly supporting the corruption crackdown, the president inevitably faces questions – particularly, just how, when his closest business and political associates are so mired in corruption, he somehow managed to stand alone above it all. Especially when his own actions smack of Biden-esque attempts to exert control over the investigation.
Just four months ago Zelensky attempted to bring Nabu and its sister agency Sapo under direct government control, forcing through quickly drafted legislation to scrap the agencies operational independence. Zelensky’s move shocked Ukraine’s international allies and prompted major street demonstrations in central Kyiv, the first public protests against the government since the beginning of the war. Under intense back-room pressure from Brussels and Washington, as well as from the Kyiv street, Zelensky eventually backed down. Nabu and Sapo’s interrupted investigations continued – culminating in this week’s politically damaging raids.
The investigation is also raising questions of just how much Western funds ended up in Zelensky’s cronies pockets?
According to a YouTube video put out by Nabu, their investigation has focused on alleged ‘kickbacks’ from contractors hired to build fortifications to defend energy infrastructure against Russian missiles and drones. The $100 million corruption scheme involved major public enterprises including Ukraine’s national nuclear power company Energoatom, alleges Nabu. As well as Mindich, former energy minister and justice minister Herman Halushchenko is among the suspects. Halushchenko has been suspended as justice minister, but says he will ‘defend myself in the legal domain and prove my position.’ Seventy searches have been carried out with serious charges to follow – though Mindich and several other leading suspects fled Ukraine just hours before the raids […]
So far the full extent of Nabu’s investigation remains officially confidential. But a slew of recent reports, including in the New York Times, suggest that corruption runs deep and far and involves many figures linked to Zelensky and to Kvartal 95. Questions have been raised over how Fire Point, a casting agency for Zelensky’s films before the war, came to acquire multi-million dollar government contracts to produce drones for the Ukrainian army. Fire Point – which has not been charged with any wrongdoing – also produces a newly developed Flamingo long-range cruise missile.
Zelensky and his inner circle thus find themselves arrayed against independent anti-corruption agencies.
Ukraine’s National Security Service, known as the SBU, is loyal to Zelensky and wields considerable domestic power through its control of the judicial system and prisons. Nabu and Sapo, on the other hand, are heavily backed politically and financially by European and US governments and helped operationally by Western security agencies. That perceived nexus of notional independence and de facto Western control has prompted some Ukrainian politicians to denounce Nabu as a tool of foreign domination. Ukraine is turning into a ‘disenfranchised colony that is losing its sovereignty,’ complained former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko in August after she backed attempts to scrap Nabu’s independence.
As in regimes like communist China, ‘sovereignty’ seems nothing more than a convenient fig-leaf for a corrupt oligarchy.
One sad takeaway of this murky story is that in many ways Ukraine continues to live by the same rules as prevailed in the wild 1990s under Leonid Kuchma or in Boris Yeltsin’s Russia […] The image of a golden toilet which was discovered in former president Viktor Yanukovych’s luxurious suburban mansion became an iconic emblem of the corruption that led to 2014’s momentous Maidan protests. It’s a supreme irony that the revolution against those golden toilet-owners led eventually to a full-scale war with Russia – the profits from which, it seems, have been used to buy yet more golden toilets.
So, for all the globalist elite and legacy media fawning, ‘brave little Ukraine’ is still just another corrupt thugocracy.
